Warring factions broke out online Thursday night, angrily waving flags of white and gold or black and blue. A bad photo of a striped dress popped up on Tumblr yesterday, and it exploded social media sites through the night, even splitting families into conflicting camps. Others swore the colors shifted back and forth in an optical illusion worthy of David Copperfield.

The black and blue supporters were vindicated when another photo of the same dress, in slightly better lighting, definitively showed its true colors. Still, knowing the colors doesn’t necessarily change how a person perceives the dress.

“Your brain perceives different colors in an image based on their context within that image and based upon our previous experiences with daylight and shadows,” said Michael Fox, a neuroscientist at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. Fox is an expert on the neural circuits underlying visual system function. “If your brain assumes the dress was photographed in a shadow, it compensates and you perceive a white and gold dress. If your brain interprets the photo as being overexposed or in extremely bright daylight, your brain compensates in the other direction and you see the black and blue colors.”

Our eyes aren’t playing tricks, then. We’re all taking in the same visual information – we all see the same colors. It’s how our brains rank the surrounding information that decides the colors we perceive.

Then why do the colors seem to shift for some people? There’s a lot of surrounding information that we’re taking in. It’s not just the apparent shadow cast on the dress, or the light flare to the right of the dress. There’s also the light from the rooms we’re sitting in, the light from the devices on which we’re viewing the dress, the tilt of the screens, the tilt of our heads, whether we’re wearing glasses. All of these little things heavily influence how our brains choose to interpret the image. The image above, from Wired, shows how the dress can appear to change colors.

Basically, we’re all right. Just some of us are more right.

For more fun and confusion, check out these color illusions from the Lottolab Studio, a perception research group.

Disclaimer: I’ve seen the other photos. I understand the optical illusion of colors and shadows. I know, empirically, the dress is blue and black. And, yet, I still see white and gold.

My uncle is friends with a couple who are both scientists. He invites them to my cousins’ birthday parties, so we get to chat a few times a year. The couple met during their school days, fell in love over textbooks and microscopes, got married, and support themselves by teaching and researching. Best of all, they get to travel. They travel all over the world to interesting places like the Gunib plateau in the Caucasus, the rainforests of Borneo, and the deserts of the high Arctic in pursuit of their science.
What do they study?
Lichen.
Lichen – like in those weird, mossy splotches that grow on rocks.
When they told me this over cake and hamburgers on my uncle’s back porch, my jaw dropped. I was incredulous and envious, and immediately stopped listening in order to re-evaluate all of my life choices.
Where did I go astray? Should I have studied lichen? I guess so. Or hydrogeology, definitely. I could have been scampering through the hills and valleys, pressing my ear to the ground to listen for water (or whatever they do).
And did you know that there are people who study tidal marks to determine how the revolution of the moon has changed over the course of millions of years? These scientists bounce from beach cliff to beach, rocky island to lagoon, tracing the moon’s shifting signature along the coastline.
Of course I know these representations are fantasies – the “what-other-people-think-I’m-doing” version of careers that have their fair share of bureaucratic frustrations and computer-staring. I also suspect that I probably wasn’t cut out for any of these pursuits because I seem to be more excited about the places they would take me than the work they entail. (Travel writer? Photographer? Or a combination: National Geographic photographer. Boom. I’m waiting for the call.)
There was in fact a time when I claimed the descriptor “scientist.” I studied astronomy when I was an undergraduate, and I remember many long summer nights at the observatory followed by many long days of data crunching. I learned valuable lessons during that time, not the least of which being that in order to be a scientist, you have to have a passion for your science. Until recently, people have been slow to associate the words passion and science. But let me tell you, only the greatest of passions (or a complete lack of it) would get a person through the mountains of error analysis that are necessary to put forth a hypothesis.
In the end, I re-purposed these experiences into communications. My lack of commitment to a single scientific subject is a boon in this career, where I get to write about research that runs the gamut, from microscopic black holes to beneficial insects.
But during these cold winter days, I have moments of weakness where I huddle in my office, muttering bitterly about the adventures I’m only writing about.
For instance IPM Innovation Lab Director Muni Muniappan is currently on a two-week trip to Kenya and Ethiopia, where he is making connections, touring farms, and working very hard to lay the groundwork for the next phase of our program.
It’s 70 degrees in Kenya.
Should have been an entomologist.

When The Weather Channel meteorologist Jim Cantore stepped into an EF-5 tornado re-created in 3-D in a four-story immersive installation at Virginia Tech, his perspective was that of someone 7,000 feet tall.

Beneath him was the landscape of Moore, Oklahoma. Around him was the storm that killed 24 people in May 2013 … the whole thing is depicted on The Weather Channel. And if you want to learn more about how this walk through a tornado in The Cube at Virginia Tech, take an early look at the news story that will be coming out Monday on Virginia Tech News.

Lissett Bickford had been interested in cancer research ever since she was a teenager, when her brother’s best friend was diagnosed with leukemia. But when she got to college and decided to become an engineer, she assumed she’d have to abandon the idea of studying cancer.

Graduate school made her realize otherwise. Bickford, now an assistant professor in both the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics and the Department of Mechanical Engineering, earned her doctorate at Rice University, where she worked with clinicians at M.D. Anderson to optimize gold nanoparticles for the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer.

When she arrived at the University of North Carolina for a postdoc, she started working on a project designed to treat pancreatic cancer by delivering chemotherapy directly to typically difficult-to-treat tumors. The technique used a small device that, by generating an electric field, propelled chemotherapy drugs into targeted areas. The device could be implanted adjacent to a tumor or placed over the skin, delivering the drug exactly, and only, where it was needed.

Bickford, recalling her graduate research experiences, had an idea.

“I thought a local delivery strategy would be compelling for inflammatory breast cancer,” Bickford explained. Inflammatory breast cancer has a dismal prognosis and is hard to treat surgically, because the cancer cells invade the surrounding tissue, including the skin. A device placed directly on the skin could target those malignant cells directly.

At Bickford’s suggestion, the team added inflammatory breast cancer to its research platform in two studies. The first used nanoparticle fabrication technology developed by her principal investigator, Joe DeSimone, to create dissolvable microneedle patches for transdermal drug delivery. Those promising results were published about a year ago in Advanced Materials.

Results from the second study, published this week in Science Translational Medicine, were also encouraging: in mice with human inflammatory breast cancer, adding local drug delivery to IV delivery shrank tumors and extended survival time. And it didn’t substantially increase chemotherapy concentration in the blood plasma – a critical point, since chemotherapy’s side effects can force patients to postpone treatment or keep doctors from prescribing especially potent drugs.
Read more from Virginia Tech News.

Bickford was involved in everything from painstakingly fabricating individual devices by hand to shadowing clinicians who were collaborating on the project—“a truly multidisciplinary effort,” she said.

Today, as the head of the Medical Devices and Drug Delivery Lab at the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science, Bickford continues to use her engineering skills and passion for translational research to make sure that her work focuses on the most promising cancer treatments. “My brother’s friend who had leukemia ended up with significant heart damage as a result of his treatment,” Bickford said. “My goal is to do whatever I can to help cancer patients by reducing or eliminating the toxic effects of existing treatments.”

The Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) of North America recently selected Rajaram Bhagavathula, a Virginia Tech Industrial Systems Engineering doctoral candidate from Visakhapatnam, India, as recipient of the Young Professionals Scholarship. Bhagavathula’s research offers a new way to model nighttime roadway visibility, which has the potential to improve roadway safety, especially for pedestrians.

In 2011, fatalities among roadway pedestrians rose to nearly 5,000 across the United States. Bhagavathula’s study focuses on how well drivers detect pedestrians and other objects while driving at night. “By modeling the detection probabilities we can more accurately evaluate the safety benefit of any treatment, such as a new type of lighting, sign, pavement marker etc.,” Bhagavathula explained.

Center for Infrastructure Based Safety Systems director Ron Gibbons and leader of the ongoing project agrees, “Raj’s work is very important to the on-going analysis of the effectiveness of roadway lighting. Being able to estimate when a pedestrian is in the roadway and able to be seen is vital to determining the safety impact of a lighted environment.”

Bhagavathula holds a master’s degree in Industrial Systems Engineering with a specialization in Human Factors and Ergonomics from Virginia Tech. He is currently a doctoral candidate continuing his studies at Virginia Tech by pursuing a degree in the same program of study.

Anyone who has ever tried to kick the smoking habit knows the tight grip nicotine has on its users — and the difficulty of weaning oneself from the highly addictive drug.

Mike Zhang, a professor biological systems engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, is developing a way to release nicotine’s grasp on the nearly 1 billion smokers worldwide that struggle with nicotine addiction and its ill effects.

How’s Zhang becoming a smoking cessation program officer’s best friend?

He’s developing a vaccine that will make those inoculated immune to nicotine.

The vaccine works by using haptens — small molecules that elicit an immune response — attached to proteins that act as carriers in the bloodstream and make their way to the brain where the vaccine is distributed and blocks the pleasure response.

Zhang said the nicotine vaccine could ultimately be developed as a patch or nasal spray. Patients who are vaccinated will cease deriving the physiological pleasure of lighting up to in one to two days.

So, twenty years from now when someone asks a former smoker if they have a light, it’s likely he or she can thank Mike Zhang when the response is, “Sorry, I don’t smoke.”